Holy crap, they picked a Jesuit to be the new pope. I'm not a catholic, but I *did* go to a jesuit college and... that's an encouraging sign.

*REALLY* hoping it's one of the more liberal jesuits. This could actually signal some serious, SERIOUS reform in the church...

"What one did not hear from any senior member of the Argentine hierarchy was any expression of regret for the church's collaboration and in these crimes. The extent of the church's complicity in the dark deeds was excellently set out by Horacio Verbitsky, one of Argentina's most notable journalists, in his book El Silencio (Silence). He recounts how the Argentine navy with the connivance of Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio, now the Jesuit archbishop of Buenos Aires, hid from a visiting delegation of the Inter-American Human Rights Commission the dictatorship's political prisoners. Bergoglio was hiding them in nothing less than his holiday home in an island called El Silencio in the River Plate. The most shaming thing for the church is that in such circumstances Bergoglio's name was allowed to go forward in the ballot to chose the successor of John Paul II. What scandal would not have ensued if the first pope ever to be elected from the continent of America had been revealed as an accessory to murder and false imprisonment" Link
Meet the new pope._________________A cigarette is the perfect type of a perfect pleasure. It is exquisite, and it leaves one unsatisfied. What more can one want? ~Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

Yeah... from what I've read thus far, he seems to be a hard-line conservative. Fantastic

I, too, was hoping for a liberal. Seems the college of cardinals had enough of people like John Paul II trying to modernize the church._________________“Yields falsehood when preceded by its quotation”
yields falsehood when preceded by its quotation.

wow - they chose one already? isn't this only the first day of voting?

but i'm not wildly astonished that they picked a conservative. practically all the cardinals were appointed by either benedict or john paul, and they weren't exactly raging liberals.

well, i guess they can hope picking a latin american pope will make up for not picking one that cares about the role of women in the church, child abuse, human rights abuses.... it's like the religious version of the republican party, in a few years they will be wondering why they are still losing members. "but we've got hispanics in the leadership!"_________________aka: neverscared!

I do find it amusing that the first South American Pope is whiter than me._________________The older I get, the more certain I become of one thing. True and abiding cynicism is simply a form of cowardice.

there was a zero percent chance that they weren't going to pick an archconservative new pope. There's a reason for this; anyone who makes it up to those tiers of the church has been selected by a process which effectively tests for doctrinal adherences which are effectively mega-conservative.

You have to be one of the more conservative members of the church to get selected to go to the seminary. You have to be one of the more conservative priests to become a bishop. You have to be one of the more conservative bishops to become a Cardinal. So, even the most liberal Cardinal (which Bergoglio was not--he was in the middle third somewhere, from what I can tell) is pretty damned conservative. Considering that the church's seminary candidates already represent a body of people who are effectively pretty conservative anyway, you're talking about an end product that produces this same-as-the-old-boss swaggering shit-eating fucknut:

Quote:

Bergoglio has affirmed church teaching on homosexuality specifically that homosexual actions are immoral.[54][55] He opposes same-sex marriage,[56] and unsuccessfully opposed legislation introduced in 2010 to allow same-sex marriage in Argentina, calling it a "real and dire anthropological throwback."[57] In a letter to the monasteries of Buenos Aires, he wrote: "Let's not be naïve, we're not talking about a simple political battle; it is a destructive pretension against the plan of God. We are not talking about a mere bill, but rather a machination of the Father of Lies[58] that seeks to confuse and deceive the children of God."[59] Bergoglio has also stated that adoption by same-sex couples is a "form of discrimination against children."[60]

anyway it's not like i was really likely to have a new pope change my attitude towards catholic doctrinal discrimination and general shittiness, but this particular pick is essentially everything I could have expected from a worm-eaten ancient institution allergic to real change and committed to some of the most protohuman attitudes towards gays, womens, etc, I could ask for.

"What one did not hear from any senior member of the Argentine hierarchy was any expression of regret for the church's collaboration and in these crimes. The extent of the church's complicity in the dark deeds was excellently set out by Horacio Verbitsky, one of Argentina's most notable journalists, in his book El Silencio (Silence). He recounts how the Argentine navy with the connivance of Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio, now the Jesuit archbishop of Buenos Aires, hid from a visiting delegation of the Inter-American Human Rights Commission the dictatorship's political prisoners. Bergoglio was hiding them in nothing less than his holiday home in an island called El Silencio in the River Plate. The most shaming thing for the church is that in such circumstances Bergoglio's name was allowed to go forward in the ballot to chose the successor of John Paul II. What scandal would not have ensued if the first pope ever to be elected from the continent of America had been revealed as an accessory to murder and false imprisonment" Link
Meet the new pope.

The article has been updated and most of this section has been redacted. The reason for the redaction is given as follows:

Quote:

This article was amended on 14 March 2013. The original article, published in 2011, wrongly suggested that Argentinian journalist Horacio Verbitsky claimed that Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio connived with the Argentinian navy to hide political prisoners on an island called El Silencio during an inspection by human rights monitors. Although Verbitsky makes other allegations about Bergoglio's complicity in human rights abuses, he does not make this claim. The original article also wrongly described El Silencio as Bergoglio's "holiday home". This has been corrected.

Anyone who was hoping for a pope who would reverse course on issues like abortion, women as clergy, homosexuality, etc, does not understand Catholicism. It was never going to happen. The Catholic church does not change in a brief span of time - it took them three decades to adjust to Martin Luther, and that was a challenge that shook the church to it's core. The Catholic Church might modify its positions on homosexuality and abortion in a hundred years from now, but it certainly won't happen before then and it won't be a 180 degree shift either._________________The cat's indifferent or he's just furious, it seems that he's never neither

i'm just reading a new yorker article on benedict (here, if you can see it). i'm not catholic, so i haven't been worried too much by what the pope does. but it sounds like benedict had some ....interesting ideas for a religious leader:

Quote:

Benedict made clear that he saw his primary mission not as extending and enlarging the Catholic Church but as purifying it, by which he didn’t just mean dealing with the child-abuse scandal. He meant casting off extraneous growths and getting the Church back to what he saw as its proper roots. If this process alienated some current and former members of the faith, so be it. Benedict said numerous times that the Church might well be healthier if it was smaller.

but if you believe that only the people in your church are saved....isn't that pretty much the same as saying most of humanity can go to hell, for all of him? again, not a catholic, so i don't know what the view is on the fate of non-catholics....but still.

but again, this is the guy who was choosing the cardinals who voted for (now) pope francis._________________aka: neverscared!

Even though this should have been obvious, I'm a bit relieved._________________Scire aliquid laus est, pudor est non discere velle
"It is laudable to know something, it is disgraceful to not want to learn"
~Seneca

but if you believe that only the people in your church are saved....isn't that pretty much the same as saying most of humanity can go to hell, for all of him? again, not a catholic, so i don't know what the view is on the fate of non-catholics....but still.
[/quote]

Feeneyites* believe that...I call them "Westboro Catholics"

I was taught by Jesuits. As for Catholics being saved and non-Catholics being damned, I was directed to the parable of the man with two sons, both of whom he told to go do work in the fields. The first says "Yes, Father" but then buggers off to the agora or Renfair or whatever instead. The second says, "No, I won't" but goes and works in the field anyway. Jesus posed the question, which son did the will of the Father? i.e. Talk is cheap, actions speak louder than words.

So a non-believer who does good is ahead in the line -- so to speak -- than a believer who doesn't.

Side note -- is the Church ready for an infallible Jesuit?

*So does Mel "My Dad says I'm annulled" Gibson, but that's a whole different bag of batshit._________________Speaking of non-sequiturs...

Should have, yeah, but wasn't there initially uncertainty over whether they'd even be charged? Also, an effective sentence of 1-4yrs for rape seems... low. At the time of the offense, the two rapists were both 16, yeah? In Ohio, people can be charged as adults at the age of fourteen. It's interesting that they weren't._________________“Yields falsehood when preceded by its quotation”
yields falsehood when preceded by its quotation.